FeedCity

Theory about why we don’t fight to save the US.

Many of us haven’t personally felt much impact.

No hyperinflation yet.

The police still respond as they always have, wearing badges, faces uncovered.

The shelves are full at the supermarket.

The electricity is on, as is the internet. Buses and subways are running. The airports are open.

The Obamas and Clintons are still free, living in the US.

We read the news about universities and news orgs giving in. Corruption at the FBI and in Congress and the Supreme Court.

No major hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, tornados so cuts at FEMA not felt yet.

And we’ve been living in a normal way for hundreds of years. We’ve had no time to get used to the new normal. It doesn’t feel like anything yet.

I fear by the time we feel it it will be far too late, by design.

One more bingeable, Blue Lights from BBC on HBO Max. I love police dramas, esp British ones. I watched Peaky Blinders earlier this year and The Fall, another British crime drama, and, amazingly they all take place in Belfast, believe it or not, and don't count the number of times people say "wee" in the darndest places in BBC Belfast crime dramas. Do Brits really say wee all the time? How did I not see that coming.

Internet was out at the house all day. Luckily it was one of the most perfect days to spend outside. In the meantime, I highly recommend the Floodlines serial podcast from the Atlantic. It's bingeable in an afternoon, tells an interesting story of Katrina and New Orleans. The interview with Brownie is cringe-worthy not binge-worthy, I skipped over it.

Kev Quirk has gone back and forth between Micro.blog and Mastodon, now back on Micro.blog. It really can’t be overstated how great it is to move followers between platforms. One of the most important features of the fediverse.

Parker Ortolani blogs some initial thoughts about GPT-5:

I’ve been saying for about a year now that I believe the future of computing is software on demand. GPT-5 might just have made that a reality. It’s certainly at least the first glance at a future where that’s the case.

I’m not completely bought into this vision, where apps and UIs can be adapted on the fly, but I wouldn’t rule it out either. The screenshots from Parker are super impressive.

I found a Benchmark. Harder to find than I thought it would be.

Mark Gurman reporting at Bloomberg on Apple getting App Intents ready for the new Siri: The plan now is to ship the feature alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily. But there’s some concern inside the company, I’m told. Engineers...

Thinking about how I use AI for coding, I prefer to automate a lot of the JavaScript work, more than HTML or CSS. Feels right to have as much control over anything that touches the design. It’s hard to imagine a world where I’m not going to want to tweak the UI.

How self-tracking became self-incrimination

Bridge Pedal!

This is fun: The Bluesky Dictionary, tracking when all the words in the English dictionary have been mentioned in a Bluesky post. Currently about halfway there.

True Wednesdaycore: Even Wednesday Addams is checking out my Corona flat top! Hey Thing! Wanna come over and type with me?

It’s Sunday the 10th, the first full week of August is about to end, which means it’s time to check in on my totally arbitrary hiking challenge. As a reminder, the goal is to log at least 4810 meters of total ascent while hiking up the mountains, with two extra stretch goals...

Setting up the streaming rig for the Bridge Pedal tomorrow

Meandering research for something new led me to Bashō, and this form of poetry I had never heard of before:

Around 1682, Bashō began the months-long journeys on foot that would become the material for a new poetic form he created, called haibun. Haibun is a hybrid form alternating fragments of prose and haiku to trace a journey. Haibun imagery follows two paths: the external images observed en route, and the internal images that move through the traveler’s mind during the journey.